


Vagabond

by Anonymississippi



Series: I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song [4]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Adventure, Angst, DannyxCarmilla, F/F, Future AU, Hurt/Comfort, Silas Guardian AU, There's also fluff?, lawstein - Freeform, like how did that get in there?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-15 16:51:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3454589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've been up and down, down / You've been low, low, low / Troubled sea so deep, troubled home no sleep / You've been flying so high / Avoiding the road / Pretending to not feel alone</p>
<p>Carmilla and Danny's final year on earth. Danny wants to make it count. Carmilla wants Danny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Hey.”

Carmilla tapped the wheel on the gas lamp to increase the brightness, ignoring Danny.

“Hey, Carm?”

Danny flicked the bottom of Carmilla’s bare foot, propped carelessly atop the coffee table in the middle of the cabin. The lights gleamed low and fuzzy in snowy late January, an idle sort of Wednesday afternoon.

Danny had just returned from chopping firewood, axe handle chaffing against the coarse half-circle of dead skin built up between forefinger and thumb.

She’d never quite possessed the time or self-conceit to fret over body issues, but Danny had never been a big fan of her hands. They were filthy more often than not, cracked, dry, and blistered. Name an injury hand-related, she’d sustained it: split knuckles, broken pinkies, missing fingernails, crunched wrists, carpal tunnel. Work got _done_ with those hands, but not without some concessions on Danny’s part. For example, the scaly white dryness that accumulated on the backs of her hands in the winter months was so prickly and objectionable that sometimes Danny faltered when she touched Carmilla. She wondered if the vampire _minded_ , considering how prickly and objectionable Carmilla tended to be anyway. Those thoughts would inevitably snowball into an inner debate over Carmilla’s self-hatred and her own slight bodily neglect that Danny just ended up _doing_ something instead of brooding about it.

She’d leave the heavy thinking to the Nightwalker.

Danny poked again at Carmilla’s toe, then studied a modish and serviceable ankle that seemed imbued with its own paling moisturizer. Carmilla was all silky smooth white beaches and Danny was the textured grit of cadmium yellow sand in the Kalahari.

It’s a wonder the two fell in love.

“Carmilla?” Danny tried once more.

“Reading,” Carmilla grumped, playing trombone with the book held before her.

Danny had advised her, ages and ages ago, to just break down and get the glasses.

(“Vampire anatomies don’t deteriorate like your infirm mortal bodies do.”

“Well, it would’ve helped if ophthalmology was common practice in 1698 because you damn sure need glasses.”

“I don’t need glasses.”

“You can’t be _that_ concerned with your level of cool that you refuse to wear glasses when you obviously need them.”

“My refusal is none of your concern.”

“It’s my concern if you’re hurting your eyes. You read all the time, I don’t want you to strain yourself.”

“Why should that matter to you? Some buried feelings there, Gingersnap?”

“You know what, forget it.”

“Fine, four eyes.”

“Dammit, Carmilla—”)

“Hey, I want to talk to you,” Danny crouched low. She sat on the edge of the coffee table and placed a sweaty palm over Carmilla’s knee. “Like, kinda serious talk.”

“Oh dear,” Carmilla deadpanned. “Serious talk,” she crinkled her face inwards, a visage of oatmeal mush. Carmilla dogeared her page and set her book aside, leaned forward and scratched the tops of Danny’s hand. “We’ve already covered the safe word—”

“Carm, really,” Danny reiterated, brow set, shoulders square, tone resolute.

Carmilla regarded Danny warily; their relationship wasn’t new, but the dynamic (the tongues in each other’s mouths and fingers in each other’s bodies and love in each other’s hearts) was certainly novel, considering how long their tenuous friendship had spanned.

“I’m listening,” Carmilla rasped.

“So, you can’t laugh, or anything,” Danny began, reaching around to her back pocket.

In her reddish plaid and workaday denim Danny looked like a futuristic Brawny woman, part Paul Bunyan and part domestician. In a twisted way, she was both; she leveled swaths of forest or demon hoards to shed light on the ground below, the Silas grounds, her responsibility for upwards of a millennium. Yet her domesticity asserted itself like a hound rutting against a table leg; she cleaned and cooked and sewed with pragmatic purpose, finding fulfillment in the action, in the _doing_ , in her own capability.

But the Silas threats had slackened, waned, and the geographic limits imposed upon her person were beginning to manifest themselves in boredom, in dissatisfaction (excepting one prominent area of her routine, the closest she’d ever come to a joie de vivre).

Danny wasn’t in love with her life.

She was in love with Carmilla.

“I want to ask you a favor,” Danny said, pulling the tawny, creased page of college-ruled scrawl from her back pocket. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but I think it could make this last year more useful.”

“ _Useful_?” Carmilla questioned skeptically.

“So, uhm… see, there are these things I want to do, that I’d like to accomplish before… uhm, you know, well, before we—I—”

“Before you kill yourself,” Carmilla finished directly.

“Uh, right,” Danny said, scrambling to recover. “And I know it’s silly, but I… well, when I was human, and then when I realized I was stuck here, I added to it, so it’s kinda substantial… I, uhm, sort of made a bucket list.”

“A bucket list?”

“It’s a list of things you want to do before you die.”

“I know what a bucket list is, Gingersnap,” Carmilla spoke massages, vowels and consonants rolling over Danny’s temples and shoulders like pleasurable strikes and Shiatsu compressions. “But what is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, I was wondering, since we’re… uhm…”

“Gloriously fucking?”

“Nooo!!” Danny sputtered. She felt her cheeks turn to coals, smoldering in vermillion tints and heating to radiant degrees. “Since… well… I love you.”

“As well you should,” Carmilla snarked.

“And you love me.”

“That’s the debatable bit,” Carmilla teased, a pale hand slithering up the inside of Danny’s denim-encased thigh. Carmilla leaned forward off her lounge chair; she fisted her free hand in Danny’s flannel, darted burnt umber eyes over Danny’s torso until they stopped on her throat. “But you sure did wear me down.”

“I don’t think that’s how it went at all,” Danny argued, and would emphatically deny any hitch in her vocals Carmilla pointed out later.

“You have your view,” Carmilla tugged on the flannel, bringing Danny closer, giving up a little of her own ground. A mutual coming-together, paces conceded by both parties over such protracted years that the two inches separating their lips seemed utterly laughable.

“And I have mine,” Carmilla said, covering Danny’s mouth with her own.

It was strange for Danny, this new found intimacy. How kissing Carmilla, _Carmilla_ , of all people, could leave her feeling like a popped top of a lemon-lime soda, bubbly and effervescent. Carmilla bolstered a bizarre cheerfulness, giddiness, school-girl-crush and holding hands mid-morning and reading similar stories only to discuss and sympathize, argue and deviate. And then the sex that bordered on violence and ownership, zigzagging and jerking into a cherished, compassionate exercise of fingerprints and solicitous touches…

Carmilla ticked every box on some life-partner checklist Danny never knew she had. Perhaps Danny loved differently after centuries of living. Love became fulfillment of everything Danny never knew she wanted, and certainly never needed. Fulfillment of things she definitely didn’t want, didn’t care about, but that she accepted all the same, because Danny was so damn in love with the Nightwalker that extras didn’t matter anymore. She just wanted to spend the last year of her (excessively long) life making Carmilla happy, letting her _shine_.

Danny slipped her hands into the troughs of Carmilla’s waist, rubbing her fingers against the tie of the sinfully soft robe she’d ordered as a gift for Carmilla two weeks previously.

Black satin.

Carmilla lingered with kisses on the tips of Danny’s nose. She moved on to the ginger’s flushed cheeks, tapped her lips against Danny’s fluttering eyelids and sighed throatily. She twiddled the fringe of Danny’s tapered bangs with one hand and with the other, used the bristly split ends of Danny’s low ponytail as a make-shift body brush. She swiped the clumped hair against Danny’s neck in an indolent fashion, no doubt relishing Danny’s ticklish squirms.

“Uhn… Carm—”

Carmilla abandoned Danny’s bangs with a leer of selfish satisfaction. Danny felt immortal hands trickle over her cheekbones like raindrops on a windshield. The fingertips padded over her chin, raked over her throat and dipped—dipped— _dipped_ until they popped the top button of her shirt.

“You’re trying to distract me,” Danny whimpered.

“Is it working?” Carmilla murmured, rolling her shoulder forward so that the _v_ of the robe slipped to inappropriate degrees, revealing a lavish expanse of gypsum-tinted skin.

“Uh—ye—no!” Danny insisted, physically shaking her head to jolt herself back to topic. “I have a list,” Danny announced again, to which Carmilla flopped backward, deflated and floundering, like a blown tire after an epic high-speed chase.

“And I obviously can’t do all of it, considering Silas boundaries and all—”

“So we have to start working on the ones you can do?” Carmilla groaned.

“I know you’re allergic to activity—”

“Not _all_ activity—”

“Love, please,” Danny chided gently, and Carmilla’s granite stare melted into gooey caramel.

“I was thinking, and this is up to you completely…” Danny faltered, curling her lip as she groped for a proper way to phrase her request. “There might even be some things on here we’re not even going to consider, because I want to take into account how you might feel about it—”

“The point, dearest.”

“Could… well, would you want to do some of the stuff on my bucket list?” Danny asked, staring down at the yellowed parchment. “You wouldn’t have to do all of it, but uhm… I sorta thought it out,” Danny grinned sadly, setting the paper aside and producing a box from beneath the coffee table. She set the newspaper-wrapped gift into Carmilla’s lap and waited.

“What is this?” Carmilla asked.

“Open it!” Danny grinned amiably.

“No, I… why do you keep giving me things?” Carmilla asked.

“Well maybe it’s not just for you, you ever think of that?” Danny countered, crossing her arms over her chest. She hiked one ankle up onto her opposite knee, the coffee table groaning under her weight.

_On second thought, let’s rethink this perch._

She placed her hands on her kneecaps and pushed off, headed over toward the fire to throw one of the recently chopped logs into the firebox.

“But… the book,” Carmilla said. “And the oil lamp, and the robe… not to mention the fact that you built me an entire loft, a bed frame, three bookcases and…” Carmilla dropped her voice and placed her chin on her hand, refused to meet Danny’s eyes. “… a scratching post.”

Danny snorted, then whacked a log into place. Embers danced about and a wave of heat that could’ve been embarrassment sucker-punched Danny in the gut.

“I like doing things for you,” Danny explained.

“Why?”

Danny’s shoulders sank; she tugged at the tie of her ponytail and ran her fingers through her tangles, balled it all back up and rethreaded it. Danny knew she probably looked manic after her wood-cutting session and Carmilla’s subsequent playtime with her hair. Even after a few moments of nervous fidgeting, she couldn’t find an answer.

“Don’t know.”

“There must be some reason…”

Danny drifted back, over years and patterns and events and actions, finally settling on a theory posited from when she was mortal, what seemed like eons ago.

“I think that’s just how I show… it’s how I let myself feel. I don’t always say the right things, because in the moment I get really worked up," Danny said. "And I’m not the most touchy-feely, and I’m not always there, you know? I’ve had a lot of other commitments, but I can… I can do this stuff for you. I can try to make you feel better. And now that we’re down to the proverbial wire, I can get you things. Between you and me both we’ve got millions accumulated, so why not spend some of it? Who better to spend it on? I just placed an order for a cart of champagne!”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Babe, you’re losing it,” Carmilla quipped, toying with the curlicued ribbon holding the package together.

“This isn’t just for you, okay? It’s for both of us,” Danny said.

Carmilla’s smile grew crocodile large, her eyes cast in that mischievous glint that twelve-year-old boys get when they’ve gotten away with something naughty.

“Stop with the leering, it’s not a sex thing,” Danny admonished.

“Damn.”

Carmilla took her sweet time opening the package, unfolding layer after layer of paper, running a shellacked nail over the tape holding the box together. She withdrew the device, a slim black instrument of plastic, plexiglass and technology. Carmilla, Danny noted, at least made an _attempt_ to cover her grimace.

The vampire wouldn’t have covered up anything last year. But now there were shitty _feelings_ involved, and Danny was both happy and sad. Happy that Carmilla cared enough to pretend to like it. Sad that Carmilla now felt that she had to pretend.

Why couldn’t theirs be a simple love?

“What the hell—I mean, thanks, uh, Gingersnap,” Carmilla said, syllables stilted and staccato.

Danny rewarded her with a tight-lipped grin, then shuffled over toward Carmilla’s arm chair.

“Hand it over.”

“No, it’s my… uhm, present.”

“Stop being an idiot. I know you don’t know what it is.”

“Was the half of the present to yourself making me look like a fool, because that’s in very bad taste, Daniele.”

“No, it’s… will you just give it to me?”

Carmilla harrumphed, but handed over the device with a careless flick of the wrist.

“Careful!”

“Shit, Danny, you won’t even tell me—”

“Just gotta activate it—boom! Perfect,” Danny said, and before Carmilla could squirm away, Danny had placed the circlet on her head.

Carmilla’s hand flew to her temple, feeling the thin piece below her fingers, rotating it so that it didn’t scratch against the tops of her ears.

“Check it out,” Danny said, and pressed a panel on the device near the base of Carmilla’s skull.

From a small, unsuspecting black box on the table sprang a holograph of the cabin, 360 degrees of three-dimensional projection that shifted with the slightest movement of Carmilla’s head.

“What is…”

“It’s a camera,” Danny said. “Well, it’s like a headband that projects what you see, but the really cool thing is the _range_ on this thing. Projects in real time, zero delay, you could be in the middle of the Outback and I’d still see your every move just as you made it. It’s weather-proof, water-proof, shatter-resistant, there’s even a concealment feature, so if you don’t want people to know you’re wearing it you just press this section right—”

Carmilla swatted Danny’s hand away.

“So what does all of this have to do with your bucket list, Gingersnap?”

“Well, I mean, if I can’t be there to do the stuff, I can at least, you know, see it happening. Get to sort-of experience it if… if you wanted to, I mean.”

Carmilla touched the black tech halo once more, her attention ping-ponging between the hologram and Danny’s face. Danny feared it would backfire, the whole proposal. Carm might see it as manipulation, getting buttered up with presents only to be assigned a job, which was the absolute _last_ thing Danny wanted. These were just things Danny wanted to do, but she couldn’t. Would never be able to. And Carm… it would be good for her.

Because apparently Danny knows what’s best for everyone.

_Dammit!_

“You know what, this was a stupid idea,” Danny said, reaching for the device on Carmilla’s head. Carm ducked her grab, then stood to face Danny head-on.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t want you to feel like you _have_ to do this,” Danny began, and she could already feel herself spiraling, her mind reeling, words spilling, the way she spoke when she was worried or frustrated and she just needed to get it all out, to _explain_. “I just… I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I mean I… I’ve only seen so much of the world and this way I’d get to, and you’d get to go out and do things that you’ve never done before.”

Hands were now in the mix, windmilling with expression and a spastic sort of urgency: “Not that I know what you’ve done, but your interests don’t usually align with mine. Just, like, for the last year of your life, you get out of your comfort zone. If you want to! Not that I’m pressuring you to, again, this is just a suggestion—”

“Danny, calm down.”

“—it’s just that, if I ever wanted to do any of these things, I’d want to do them with you. With the person I love. I always thought I’d be doing this stuff with the person I would spend the rest of my life with and… I mean, I am. Or, will… if… you want to,” Danny finished, 60% flustered, 40% breathless. Sometimes she spoke so fast she would heave, take strange pauses in weird spaces, her sentences a hurried clusterfuck of good intentions.

Nothing like Carmilla.

Carmilla, who was all waxy, measured legatos, who never rushed just to express. Who… well, rarely expressed.

Danny considered the trade-off. Wondered which of them got the inferior deal, as far as dialogue was concerned.

“Let’s see that list,” Carmilla purred, vocals flowing leisurely, a lazy river. As if she had all the time in the world.

She did.

They both did.

But… Danny didn’t want it.

She wanted her bucket list. She wanted her activity. She wanted Carmilla.

And then she wanted peace.

That’s all she’s ever wanted.

Danny fell back on the couch and Carmilla followed, tucking herself against Danny’s side in a habitual fashion that Danny found entrancing; especially when Carm leaned her ear against Danny’s shoulder, clutched her arm like a limpet, tucked her feet below her robe as if she were settling in for a marathon of binge-watching and laziness with her large, ruddy-haired mongoose.

“Safari tour,” Carmilla read aloud, and it reminded Danny of her long-dead uncle’s records of starlet singers from the forties, all steamy resonance and brandy-laced tonality.

“Dive Shi Cheng City… is that in—”

“China, yeah,” Danny answered. “Freshwater sight, the government flooded the city in the 50s—”

“2450s?”

“1950s,” Danny replied. “I honestly thought you’d be better at history.”

Carmilla didn’t deign to respond. “Ride an elephant in Thailand.”

“It’s Siam again, now.”

“Read at least thirty books a year.”

“Check.”

“Skinny-dip at least once every five years, even when I get all wrinkly,” Carmilla smirked at that, nudged Danny’s shoulder in admonishment. “Really, Daniele, no one would’ve needed to see all of that.”

“I would’ve been the adventurous grandmother everyone wanted!” Danny argued.

“Take the kids to Harry Potter World and Disney—”

“You can, uhm… you can skip that one,” Danny muttered.

Carmilla graciously did so.

“Climb Denali. Is that like, an exchange student you were crushing on—”

“It’s a mountain in Alaska, you pervert,” Danny admonished. “Mount McKinley. It’s so pretty. Like, there’s the two peaks, but when you’re up that high, and you’re seeing out over everything, I bet you feel super strong. Invincible.”

“Daniele, you _are_ invincible.”

“Only when you’re there to carry me out of the woods. What’s next?”

“Don’t you know? You wrote it.”

“Yeah, ages ago. I’m reexperiencing it for the first time in… God, who knows. I’ve gotta get my kicks somehow now that life’s slowed down so much. No more bugbears for me to fight and I’ll just turn into, uh, you.”

“Thanks.”

“Carm, you know you’d never date yourself. Hell, half the time you don’t even _like_ yourself.”

“Let’s not get into my issues,” Carmilla insisted, moving onto the next item. “Attend a ball or state function. Hobnob with the big wigs. Shit, Danny, you’re so strange.”

“That’s when I thought I was going to be Secretary of Physical Education.”

“Is that an office?”

“I mean, they sorta lumped it under the Health Secretary’s position.”

“Try out for the Olympics. Danny, really?”

“Have you seen me with a bow?” Danny asked, cocky and damn proud. “I’d grind Robin Hood to grits. I’m surprised I didn’t put—”

“Win a gold medal,” Carmilla read. “Very presumptuous, weren’t you?”

“Just aware of my strengths.”

“Sex on the beach?”

“Huh?”

“No, it says that, right here, _sex on the beach_.”

“I probably meant the cocktail,” Danny winced.

“Danny Lawrence, my colossal exhibitionist,” Carmilla bit her ear lobe.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t mind assisting with _that_ one,” Danny’s hand caught Carmilla’s chin; she stole a peck from her lips before the vampire could answer. “You know, when it warms up.

“Does this thing record in real time, too?” Carmilla asked, gesturing to the device still encasing her head. The satin robe complemented the circlet of platinum and obsidian plexiglass, wavy hair and lightless gaze producing the effect of one futuristic angel, a Grigori cast down and chained, by her beauty, her immortality, her tragedy. An unholy blessing just for Danny Lawrence.

“Because waterproof, shatterproof, I could think of a number of good uses for a high quality camera—”

“Now who’s the exhibitionist?” Danny questioned.

“Trail ride in Patagonia, learn to play an instrument,” Carmilla returned to the list. “Deep-sea fishing. Christmas on the beach in Australia. Swing dance lessons. Have a jazz band at my wedding.”

Danny shifted so that Carmilla had to reposition against her. Clearing her throat, Danny attempted to wrestle the list away from Carmilla.

“I mean, some of my priorities have obviously changed. That’s a lot of physical stuff, stuff that could take weeks, and, uh, obviously we won’t get to all of it. If you’re still thinking about—”

“Daniele,” Carmilla spoke melodically, and turned to stroke Danny’s worries away. Funny how a finger on a cheek, a breath on her shoulder, _Daniele_ , whispered almost reverently, could bring Danny back to earth. “This was the mortal you. A very daring, ambitious you. Don’t regret your wishes. Maybe some of them are a bit out of your… well, scope. But we do what we can, okay? We… we at least have to try.”

Carmilla rose, and crossed to the sanded side table that was positioned beside her over-stuffed chair (Danny had built it two months after Carmilla had started using the loft. Centuries ago, when the vampire’s French and Italian and German texts had littered the coffee table, when blood rings stained the wooden top from neglected plastic cups, brimming with a viscous liquid. So much clutter to the point of broken glass and stained pages. Danny preferred a little more order than that). Carmilla rummaged about in her drawer, and surfaced with a leather-bound notebook.

“What’s that?” Danny asked.

“Bucket list,” Carmilla replied.

“Seriously?”

“Well…”

“Reading list,” Danny said, scanning title after title. The entire book was filled with titles. Novels, essay collections, philosophy books, magazine issues with volume numbers and dates for reference. Too much to read in a century, let alone a year. Danny flipped another page, saw that the ink shifted to something smoother, a transition from quill to lead, then maybe to ballpoint pen?

“So how about a little deal, Gingersnap?” Carmilla said, flapping the book closed and tossing it over to the side of the couch. She sank into Danny, straddled her on the couch, wound her fingers about the back of Danny’s neck to command attention. “I’ll work on your list if you work on mine. And then, when I come back, we each get to tell the other stories.”

“I like that deal,” Danny said, so consumed by ardent emotion she felt full to bursting. “It would mean… you’re so… I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

Carmilla kissed her closer, kissed her hotter, branded and seared, as if with her heat she could weld their two bodies together. They’d been trapped in a raging inferno before, only this time they didn’t mind burning up together.

“So… bucket list?” Danny tried.

“Mmmmmhmmm…” Carmilla pressed a kiss to the corner where lip met cheek, then meandered in a southerly direction.

“Carm…”

“Danny, we’ll talk logistics later. Just _not right now_.”

“Right, more important things,” Danny said, and rose with Carmilla clinging to her like lichens to a tree trunk. That satin robe was off the vampire's shoulders in an instant, tie ripped away, as Danny carried Carmilla off to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first trips to check off the list. A reluctant Carmilla adventures away, leaving Danny back at Silas, but still keeping in touch. She learns it's okay to smile once in a while. Learns indescribable sadness... well, that's okay, too.
> 
> There you go, there you stay / Keeping low never wanna play / Wandering far, disappearing / Feet stuck in place, not moving.

Thailand

“This thing smells worse than your socks after one of you habitual gallivants about campus,” Carmilla complained, eyeing the pachyderm with lackadaisical amusement.

_Danny wanted to ride that?_

“That would be a run, Carmilla. You know, for exercise.”

“Yet still,” Carmilla ignored her, “you insist on being transported by the beast Hannibal was so fond of during his conquests. Some would say you're compensating for something.”

“Come on, Nightwalker, you promised,” Danny spoke over the microphone in her ear.

The incorporeal voice transmitted via cochlear sensors embedded in the camera heightened the peculiarity of the entire affair:

Carmilla stood up to her ankles in jungle scrub, wet, earthy and dank. Leaves with rigid veins popping along their surfaces plastered themselves to her ankle boots, dampening the leather, ruining whatever bad-ass-ness she’d hoped to maintain while adhering to Danny’s demands for the excursion. The black tank-and-shorts combo she’d donned for two parts dispassionate aesthetic and one part practicality was plastered to her body, humid moisture suctioning the garments against her pores like a second, burdensome skin.

A skinny old Thai man smiled bemusedly at Carmilla. His cheeks were lined with tanned age and geniality, his head wrapped in a bright purple patterned scarf. He kept patting the shoulder of the beast as if the thing couldn’t crush his spindly little frame in one fell swoop.

Carmilla had wandered the Ayutthaya ruins solo that very dawn, forcing Danny to stay awake until midnight back in Styria to observe via hologram. The views were worth it, though. There were no tourists bounding about the ancient site, just the rivers rolling and a Buddha head, carved into overlarge tree roots that had once been submerged from the intersecting river floods. The breaking sun caught the tips of the crumbling brick towers and cast lengthy, drooping shadows over the grounds, sharpening lowlight and exposure over the red-orange dirt below her.

It was quiet enough that Carmilla could disregard the perspiration spilling from her brow, her underarms, from the creases of her legs and in between her toes. Still enough that she could sit and take a second, a minute, uninterrupted and tranquil.

She could hear Danny’s occasional breath over the microphone, but the Gingersnap let her have this: a peaceful sunrise; a watershed moment, in effect, and not just for all the sweating she was doing. These moments of strenuous activity, coupled with a centering sort of peace. Yoga on a globe-trotting scale. Preparing her for… well, whatever they decided to do at the end of the year.

Which was a significant ways away, unlike the elephant that shuffled warily in her presence. It seemed to know that her other preferred form tended to stalk jungles like this one with saber-teeth and pointed claws. Maybe elephants never forget because they know everything innately, like whether the person about to climb onto their back is actually human, or some cross-breed between the Undead and a jaguar.

“Up, up!” the Thai man commanded Carmilla, and the elephant sank to its feet.

Danny had insisted on Carmilla’s riding the beast ‘bare back,’ as the framed saddles that sat two atop the beasts had been deemed inhumane. So Carmilla climbed aboard as gracefully as she could, black knee socks falling and shorts hiking up, showcasing more skin in daylight hours than she had in several months. The Thai man seemed shocked by the expanses of white, but tapped at his own pachyderm with a cane pole and began to move forward into the jungle. The behemoth whose head she sat atop lurched forward with all the smoothness of a Styrian coach-and-four circa 1683, and it took a significant amount of core control to rock with the beast, leaning forward as it trudged up hilly paths, gliding her hips with a gauche gait so she didn’t go pitching over the undersized mammoth’s head.

“How is it?” Carmilla heard Danny ask over the microphone.

“Strange,” Carmilla answered truthfully.

The Thai man turned around, glancing back at her from the head elephant. She flicked her wrist and regally dismissed him.

“It looks cool as hell,” Danny said.

“Hot as hell. I’m sweating bullets, Gingersnap.”

“What’s it feel like?”

“Like I’ve got scratchy elephant skin chaffing my thighs and my shorts are riding up my ass crack.”

“Carmilla, what do you see?”

“Trees. Wet trees, and dirt. Lots of dirty, muddy, rutted up earth with paw prints and—oh,” Carmilla stuttered, catching sight of a rhinoceros hornbill in a tree nearby. “What the—”

“That’s so cool!” Danny squealed over the microphone.

“It’s as big as my forearm, Gingersnap,” Carmilla said. “It could gobble up your wrist with a single peck. Uhp, here we go.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Do I look like I’m steering this thing, Red Vine?” Carmilla snapped, gripping the rope handles circling the crown of the animal’s head with such force the twine might have disintegrated in her hands. “I don’t know how I feel about this tour guide. He keeps smiling.”

“Maybe he’s just happy.”

“Nobody’s that happy being around something that reeks of fecal matter,” Carmilla snarked back.

“Come on, Carm. Live a little.”

“Low blow, Danny.”

“I don’t see how you can be so grumpy when you’re in the jun—holy crap.”

“What?” Carmilla asked, periscoping her head about the area.

“Nothing, don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t,” Carmilla replied. “Until you told me not to. What did you see?”

“Well, it wasn’t like a, uh, cougar or anything.”

“It wouldn’t be, as cougars are native to the Americas,” Carmilla returned.

“Easy there, emo Trebek,” Danny said. “It just… _might_ have been some carnivorous jungle cat stalking your six.”

“I’m not worried,” Carmilla said. “Pretty sure I could take the thing,” Carmilla answered, distracted momentarily by a tropical flower. It was a violent magenta, dappled with sherbet spots and fuchsia lining. The petals were trumpeting outward in a layered, aggressive display of texture and color, like a Jackson Pollack superimposed onto natural canvas.

It would look beautiful, tucked behind Danielle’s ear, bold jewel colors juxtaposed with her warm red tones.

The elderly Thai man in front of her started barking orders at his elephant. He whacked the extended cane pole behind him at the trunk of her own sentient vehicle, causing the elephant she was riding to make a quarter turn to the left. Carmilla’s eyes widened when she saw what was happening.

“Ha! Carm—”

“Oh, hell no!”

Carmilla scrambled up the back of the beast as it stepped into the watering hole. By the time she’d reached the peak of the spine the elephant was nearly submerged up to its withers, which meant she was _standing on the back of a fucking elephant in the middle of a stagnant pool likely contaminated with animal waste._

The Thai man was cackling. Carmilla could tell Danny was crying gleefully, watching the scenario unfold on that idiotic holograph projection resting on their cabin table. The redhead snorted and laughed into Carmilla’s eardrum, unfettered amusement transmitted over thousands of miles. In the meantime Carmilla was sliding; vampiric constitution or no, wet elephant skin didn’t provide the best grip for black ankle boots chosen more so for fashion than tread.

The Thai man barked another order and the elephant rose on what must have been a submerged shelf of land in the water, which sent Carmilla sprawling and sputtering across its back. She latched onto whatever holds she could find, gritting into the beast’s back and smelling naught but _jungle_.

“I’m gonna _murder_ you, Gingersnap!”

“Carm! Holy crap you should _see_ yourself!”

Another shriek from the Thai man and the elephant plopped itself into the water with all the grace of, well, an elephant. Water splashed and swirled in small whirlpools on the watering hole’s surface. Vines drooped in spiraled ropes and the flowers giggled in chorus, neon and happy and thriving, seemingly at Carmilla’s expense.

“Nâ!” screeched the tour guide.

“Na? What the—no, no—naaah!”

The elephant’s trunk dipped and rose almost in slow motion, the ominous, curving expanse of muscle and cartilage aimed heavenward and poised for spraying.

Which it did.

The elephant showered Carmilla with water from its trunk, soaking her further. She’d probably get wetter on this excursion than on her impending trip to the underwater city in China.

She set her face into a stern expression of discomfort and malcontent, Grumpy Cat meets the regal “We are not amused”; but it didn’t really matter, because Danny’s guffaws and the Thai man’s chortles mingled and overlaid in a harmonic convergence of delight.

And it was so ridiculous, Carmilla in black shorts and a sopping tank on the back of an elephant, half-submerged in a watering hole in the middle of the ancient Siamese wilderness. An old man cackled and her lover smirked thousands of miles away but it didn’t _matter_ , because it was just that kind of enjoyment, that type of fun she’d detested for years.

Yet implicit in enjoyment is _joy_. And that’s what Carmilla felt, soaked to embarrassment by one of Earth’s biggest mammals for the first time in her life.

The elephant trumpeted.

Danny laughed.

Carmilla smiled.

 

* * *

 

 Alaska

“Holy fuck.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

The sky ignited with coppery filaments, rendering the space over the mountain an insistent, penetrating green. In an expansive field at Denali National Park Carmilla stood, staring as the aurora shimmied over a cloudless night. Waves of refracted light bounded over the atmosphere in a shimmery spectrum; visual notes starting at a faded-out aqua burgeoned into deepest emerald, then took a dive into radiation-like lemon.

“It’s definitely something,” Carmilla said, shoving her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. She stood beside the edges of a frozen lake, rhombus in outline, surrounded by withering sedges in an open meadow. Before her, the tree line emerged, but Carmilla could just make out a scree-slope of slated rock jutting upward beyond the spray of fir trees, a herald of the mountain’s baseline.

The meadow was quiet, save for the wind. It kicked and shrieked terribly, shocking rugged grasses with its chill. Had the lake not been frozen, ripples would have winded their ways down from north to south, waves lapping over a rocky shoreline.

Had it been summer, wildflowers would have overtaken the meadow: goldenrod, monkshood, forget-me-not and larkspur, violet fireweed and startling blue gentiana.

Carmilla could imagine the scene: flowers so bright it seemed a rainbow had vomited onto the flora; a lake so clear she was sure a glass-maker had placed his best mirror, a tilted square of enormous scale, onto the meadow floor; occasional wildlife, a fox, a deer, brave enough to breach the forest line while a duo of immortals stretched lazily in the tall grasses.

Danny would be there, in jeans colored as gaudy as the flowers. She’d sit on a blanket for a while, reading a book about ecology, or Kierkegaard, or Stokes’ theorem for vectors (she had many interests). But, as the gingersnap was wont to do, Danny would get bored.

“Up for a hike?” she’d hypothetically ask.

“What about me says ‘nature girl’ to you, Red Vine?” Carmilla would hypothetically reply.

“You’re right,” Danny would rise on her knees and hover next to Carmilla’s cheek, nuzzle there while the vampire dozed with her forearm thrown over her eyes, trying to shield herself from that damnable sunlight that Danny seemed not just to favor, but to thrive in. “I’ll be back in a little while, don’t maul any villagers while I’m gone.”

“I’ll do my best to restrain myself,” and then Carmilla would feel lips sweeter than honeysuckle alight on her cheek, press, and depart; she’d be left to her attempts at day-napping.

Sometime later, of course hypothetically, Carmilla would hear a crashing through the trees. She’d awaken (reluctantly, dazedly) and would turn her attention toward the eastern side of the clearing. Because if she knew Danny Lawrence (and there was much in this world she did know, after a thousand years of living), that woman would be covered in Sundew briars with dirt smudged over that striking cheekbone. Danny’d have something in her hand, a branch, a stick, somehow whittled to a point and stripped of cumbersome twigs should the Amazon need to launch it from her grip and into some poor creature’s abdomen. Danny would stagger forward from the underbrush clumsily, then attempt to rein in her adrenaline by fidgeting with her hair, running fingers through tangles and straightening a ripped shirt and smiling, half-energized and half-abashed, because she’d gone and stirred up some trouble.

“It’s okay!” Danny would yell across the lake water. The surface would tremble beneath her vocal projections, because even nature recognized the power, the gargantuan vivacity somehow contained in a six-foot frame. “Just a… bear,” Danny would admit, and her voice would drop to sheepish tones, no longer ringing with justifiable zest. “—wolf hybrid, thing. Maybe an overgrown wolverine-moose species.”

“They’re breeding those now?” Carmilla might quip, flopping back down onto the blanket, unconcerned.

“Not exactly. Which is why it took me a little off-guard.”

“Danny Lawrence, caught unawares? How unlike you.”

“I was on a mission.”

“ _That_ sounds very like you. Though what mission you could have in the ruins of a once-National Park I could not begin to fathom.”

Danny would screw up her face, finger the tattered hem of her shirt, then finally muster up the guts to do whatever the hell it was she had set off to do in the first place.

“Don’t laugh,” she’d say.

“I make no promises.”

Danny would reach into her jeans pocket and extract a mushy stemmed flower, petals tinted with darkening moistures due to injurious creases and pressures of denim. The flower was white, or would have been, if the water within it hadn’t leaked and turned the velvety leaves to creamy egg-shell. In the center where the feeding veins ran, a circle of black blossomed, a stain on what would have been a rather pretty little wildflower.

“It would have been a bouquet,” Danny would mumble with noted chagrin.

“But the monsters had other plans?”

“It seems monsters are always interfering with me and you. It’s like… ours is a story of _almost_ s. Almost got the bouquet. Almost saved the Silas forest. Almost found a way to leave without me burning up.”

“You’re here, Lionheart,” for somehow Carmilla had lapsed into the deepest tenderness. She reached out and cradled Danny’s offering in her cupped hands, surveying the little weed with the awe of a child. The flower seemed to hold such promise, had it not been tucked away in Danny’s pocket. Had it not endured some sort of battle, some tragedy. It seemed, in her hands, with Danny revering it as she did, that the flower had great capacity for love.

“What do you call this?” Carmilla asked.

“Your fantasy, love,” Danny would reply, because really, this was all a hypothetical, playing out in Carmilla’s head beneath a hypnotic aurora on a February evening.

The sun shown so bright in her night-awake-dream and Carmilla didn’t feel sleepy at all.

“I almost loved you for real,” Danny admitted.

“But you don’t?”

“I do. I think I do. I think you think I don’t.”

“That’s one too many removes from reality to be genuine, Gingersnap.”

“And there’s the point, isn’t it? How removed are we, immortal and blemished, like this little flower here?” Danny asked her, and then shoved the stem underneath her nose. “Do you know what this is called?”

“I do not.”

“This is Shadowmar. It only grows northward of the fifty degree latitude line. Discovered in 2217. Because of the raised lump, right here, botanists nearly mistook the blotch in the middle for a virus. It grows through rocks, in the scree, pushes through talus deposits and layers and layers of gritty debris. It’s beautiful though.”

“I suppose, if it didn’t look like a wretched Dalmatian.”

“It’s not natural,” Danny said, as if this had been the crux of her argument for the longest time. “They can’t trace it, but the theory is that a group of mountaineers settled in at Burgos’s botanical outpost in the 2200s, and somehow seeds from Europe cross-bred in one of the harshest environments known. It didn’t thrive originally, that’s why it took fifteen years to be discovered. But the black spot dove to the heart of the petal and here you have it, a black heart, flourishing in some of the harshest conditions the world can offer.”

“This reeks of metaphor, Daniele.”

“Don’t chastise me, Carm. This is your fantasy.”

“And what does that say about me?”

“That you’ve just needed a sounding board to work through your shit. To reconcile the fact that maybe you don’t want to be heroic, but you do want to prosper; you want someone to pick you and take you home and present you with all the pomp and circumstance that bouquet-presentation is associated with, just so you feel like you still mean something. That you’re still _worth_ something.”

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks,” Carmilla insisted, but the flower crumbled to dust in her hands.

“I accept that. That your motives are still selfish, to an extent. You don’t necessarily do things for the greater good, you do them for your own good. Just… your self-interest occasionally aligns with the greater good, especially when you latch onto someone else.”

“I know this.”

“As do I.”

“Do you, Daniele? Do you really know what it means to love me?”

Danny didn't answer her.

* * *

 

“Carm?”

Carmilla turned her attention back to the mountain peak in the night. Chilled Alaskan air filled her nostrils. She registered the cold, the bite, but sensation was less prevalent now. She could draw the parallel (could, but probably shouldn’t… oh, to hell with it) between herself and Daniele. They each had experienced (were experiencing, continuous, present) a sort of paralysis. Danny’s was paralysis of the body.

Hers? Paralysis of the heart.

It’d taken red hair and light blue eyes to jump start the cardiac muscle once again.

“This thing looks like a real piece of work, Gingersnap,” Carmilla began, trudging across the darkened meadow. “Two feet of snow and piling as we climb.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to this one during the summer?” Danny asked through the microphone.

Her voice sounded distracted, a little warbled, like trying to overhear a conversation in the next room by sticking a glass up to the wall.

“And miss your stupefaction over the light show? No, that’s the entertaining part for me,” Carmilla quipped, hitching her small bag higher on her shoulder.

“Are you sure you won’t take more equipment?” Danny asked, seemingly more in tune with the situation. “I know you’re not operating under certain physiological constraints, but you still might want to take a tent. Climbers take like, at the very least two weeks to make the trip.”

“I can cut that in half,” Carmilla said. Cold and pine forest surged to her senses once more. Like a Styrian childhood, a half-remembered yesterday.

“I’ve got my blood packets, I’m fine.”

“You don’t even have proper boots—”

“Danny—”

“ _Or_ the mountaineering parka I tried to order for you—”

“Danny, I—”

“You’ll be safe, won’t you?”

Carmilla paused; she pressed her shoulder into the trunk of a fir tree. It was black as pitch all around her, but the snow, the starlight, the waving aurora overhead and Danny in her ear… it fed her in ways blood never could, sated the last strips of her humanity. Danny and her missions, Danny and her love, they were carving against the monstrous exterior, reaching into her bodily cavities and violating her insides, fishing through intestine and gall bladder and chunky hunks of liver and stomach, rooting around in there to look for IT, the big IT, her residual strains of decency.

Carmilla didn’t know whether to love Danny for it or resent her wholeheartedly.

“You’ll be with me, will you not?” Carmilla asked over the microphone.

“Until you give up or die,” Danny joked.

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Carmilla asked, but Danny didn’t answer immediately.

Carmilla went back to her hypothetical summer meadow, with disintegrated Shadowmar and a blanket of wildflowers, Danny kissing her cheek and looking at her like she was still worthy.

“No,” Danny answered, shocking her reverie. “I truly don’t think it is. At least, not with us anyway.”

Carmilla nodded, then set off through the trees once more.

“I love you,” she heard Danny say.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“No, Carm…really.”

Carmilla reached a worn path, animal and bootprints alike having cut an open trail into the six-inch snow bank. Others were on the mountain, but she only needed Danny.

All these years… that’s all she’s ever needed.

“I love you so much I can hardly believe it,” Carmilla answered, then set off up the mountain.

* * *

 

She crested the western peak six days later, having set a relentless pace. The aurora still shown this far north, still waved flag-like and constant this deeply into winter.

Blue. Bluer than summer berries and sadness and denim. A warmer blue, heated by tears and something like adoration, looking down on her with so much love she couldn’t bare to stand it.

Carmilla collapsed onto her knees at the summit and sat, huddled in the snow, until Danny woke and came back over the microphone. And Danny, darling-dearest-lionhearted Daniele, talked her down from the peak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rolling right along here... feedback always appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vagabond as you / Ran a mile no shoes / If the sun goes down too soon / Embrace the starry-eyed moon.
> 
> Fulfilling one of Danny's requests, Carmilla slips back into the darkness. This time, Danny witnesses the lapse. And Carmilla, wretched, brooding soul that she is, doesn't think Danny can ever forgive her.
> 
> Danny can't wait to point out just how wrong the stupid Nightwalker is.

The rain didn’t let up for the glitterati. Humans were never exempt from Nature.

Carmilla (despite her penchant for supernatural transport) was nearly as soaked as the mortal guests. It didn’t matter if they appeared on the carpet in a black poof of brimstone dust or a black streak of stretch limo hovercraft, the attendees were still getting saturated in their designer dresses. The forecast had called for a clear night.

The weather did not abide by such prescriptions.

Older ladies clutched their pearls and huddled close to EU interns wielding energy-field umbrellas; the young men in rented tuxes gripped light-weighted handles, the European Union logo bursting forth from moist palms amid grumbling protests. Interns escorted dignitaries to a gala by night, made copies and coffee by day.

Carmilla rejected an escort and sauntered into the gilded hall, all plush cranberry carpets and tinkling lemon chandeliers, string music and simpering politics; hors d’oeuvres trays laden with scrumptious catered delicacies from all over the European mainland skittered about the space in the hands of the white-shirted wait staff. Boorish young senators’ sons swerved drunkenly and laughed boisterously while cozying up to young ladies in scandalous formal attire, the women coquettish and buzzing. They wrapped manicured fingertips around cocktail glasses and cavernous champagne flutes filled to brimming.

The affair was lavish, Carmilla’s jeweled dress long, sleeveless, and backless. Her hair was up, her lips blood red, and the sheath of material keeping her modesty in check glimmered with onyx crystals. She wore gloves up to the elbow, and her diamond choker with dangling baubles teetered on the edge of imperiousness, yet didn’t quite cross over into tacky territory.

Champagne materialized in her hand and she made her first turn about the room.

“Oh my god.”

“God, really? Seems a little overstated, even for Him,” Carmilla murmured into the microphone, her concealment feature activated for fashion and discretion’s sake.

“Carm, that’s the head of the EU,” Danny said, as Carmilla made another swoop by a congregation of people in their finery, all seemingly attuned to a single older woman in a lavenderesque gown and jacket combo.

“So?”

“So?! She made a number of policy alterations that catapulted a stagnant economy out of debt. She’s an economics genius. Like, four post-docs and a jillion years of marketing analysis experience.”

“Hate to burst your bubble there, Red, but _you_ have at least four post docs,” Carmilla quipped, and took a sip of champagne. “Several more than four, if my count is correct.”

“But I’ve had quite some time to work on them,” Danny countered. Back at the cabin, the ginger woman rotated the holographic picture in hand, zooming in and out and marveling at the sheer political power housed in a single venue for the night. Royalty and Presidents, Prime Ministers and Ambassadors, all slightly buzzed and giddy, ready to talk shop or drink their stressors away.

Danny’s one chance at elbow-rubbing with the uppity-ups currently running the globe (and the moon, as well as colonies on Mars, at this point).

Carmilla, however, seemed content to sulk in a corner for the duration of the night.

“Carmilla, go talk to her!”

“I have no inclination to do anything of the sort.”

“She single-handedly—”

“Doubtful.”

“Single-administrationally—”

“Not a word, Gingersnap.”

“She _helped_ institute one of the foremost economic recovery initiatives in the modern world!”

“Now, which modern are we talking about?” Carmilla griped into her glass. “We’ve got the pre-modern, the modern, the postmodern, the post-pre-modern, the Nuevo-modern, the pre-post-modern, the postmodern _Sturm und Drang_ , the modern-Rationalists—”

“Why did you even agree to go if you were just going to sulk all night?”

“Because you asked me to.”

…

…

…

“I thought you might have liked it more once you got there,” Danny said, grim and troubled, scratchy through the microphone. “You like champagne, right?”

“Daniele,” Carmilla sighed, and Danny watched as she slid against the wall, heedless of the velvet ropes placed there to protect the hung artwork. Danny recognized a well-preserved Vermeer behind a climate-controlled panel; it perched innocently above Carmilla’s shoulder, a strange juxtaposition of the dignified and the quotidian.

“You do know I’d much rather be at home, drinking champagne in my bath robe, right?”

“But you love parties! You love people watching and calling everyone ‘lackwit’ every chance you get.”

“I lov _ed_ parties, Gingersnap. But I’m over the scene. It’s not like anything’s morphed in a millennium. The more things change…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Carmilla said, observing a man who’d apparently opted for follicle reconstruction, as that was the worst hair transplant she’d seen in a century. “Perhaps it’s… perhaps I’m at a loss for good company. The level of idiotic revelry I require for entertainment is significantly lacking from this crowd. They’re no Zetas.”

Danny rotated the hologram and activated the rebound selfie cam. She could now stare at Carmilla, catch the melancholic glint in her eyes. The sadness harbored there turned Carmilla even more tragic, even more beautiful.

“You’re kinda gorgeous,” Danny mumbled.

“Humph,” Carmilla brushed it off.

“No, really. I’m… I’m sorry I can’t be there with you.”

Carmilla waited a moment, breathed, scoffed as a couple of giggling nitwits traipsed by with their dresses hiked up and booze spilling over their wrists.

“I can only imagine you in one of these gowns,” Carmilla smirked suggestively, imagining a carefree, inebriated stroll while escorted on Danny’s arm. “Royal blue in a scandalous halter, your hair soft and wavy, dress split up to _there_ on those legs of yours—”

“Sure to teeter in whatever towering heels you’d no doubt force me into,” Danny rebutted playfully. “And it’s a long fall for me.”

“It’s a gala, darling. You can’t attend a gala flat-footed and gemless.”

Danny laughed boldly, then marveled at the silence in her cabin. It had been a month and a half since she’d seen her vampire; Carmilla was traveling, working on that damned list. The first week had been fine, but two weeks induced discomfort; three weeks, a rutted sort of sadness; and now, six weeks gone without Carmilla beside her to snark away her malaise, Danny finally decided to patch the blow-out in her soul, to satisfy the longing and yearning generated by Carmilla’s absence.

Danny realized she didn’t have to deal with it. The soul-hole, the lack. A month and a half was hardly the longest Carmilla had stayed away, but it was the longest since they’d… since they’d come together. And with no Silas threats to fight, Danny fell into relaxing patterns, an easiness that wasn’t unwanted, but not fully appreciated. She needed stimulation and Carmilla was hers. Carm was out there doing all these things for her; but even Danny wasn’t stubborn enough to hold out on her initial wishes when it was obvious that her priorities had changed.

“Come home,” Danny said breathily.

“What?” Carmilla asked.

“I miss you, I’m… just come home,” Danny insisted.

“Danny, we agreed to three months for the big things at the beginning…”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about beaches and canyons and Victoria Falls and Disney World. I care about _you_. Come home and stay with me, and we’ll reevaluate.”

“This will set your time table back.”

“Screw the time table. You’re worn out and it’s a marvel you’ve made it as far as you have. I appreciate that. I appreciate _you_. You’d never even consider doing this if… if you didn’t… if I… It doesn’t matter. I miss you—I, I love you. Come home to me.”

Danny watched Carmilla stare into her champagne glass. “What’s the big deal about economic stabilization?” Carmilla questioned. “I’ll go see if I can speak with your EU lady, and then I’ll leave.”

“Karnstein, you don’t have to—”

“Yeah, well, I am. I’ll grant you a moment to be starstruck. So give me a conversational topic so I don’t look like a fool,” Carmilla chided, and threw the rest of her glass back.

“Uh,” Danny began, scrambling for her slim-line computer tablet. She pulled up a bookmarked article on EU head Rosa Webb’s policies. “Her name’s Rosa Webb. She used a combination analysis of market projection and inflation statistics to form a comparative economic trajectory similar to the DOW’s patterns from the 2610s, when it spiked away from NASDAQ S&P Global, which enabled her to—”

“Hey, watch it!”

Danny observed Carmilla snarling. She felt her own lip turn up in a sneer once she noticed the bulky hand groping Carmilla’s waist.

“Now why on earth would a beautiful creature such as yourself be over here talking to her champagne glass instead of waltzing with me?”

He was slick as an oil patch, his smile greasier than Pomade. Blonde and quaffed and playing at being debonair, with fuzzy drunk eyes and whisky breath; ornamented with a watch that, if pawned, could likely feed a developing country for half a year.

And he wouldn’t stop _pawing_ at Carmilla.

“Touch me again,” Carmilla purred, plangent and menacing, “and I will end you.”

“Carmilla—” Danny began.

“That’s a rather… _aggressive_ response for a dance invitation,” the man said, backing up a bit, standing straighter, lengthening his spine to more intimidating proportions. Groups and couples floated by unawares, but Danny was steaming beneath the collar.

Damn the distance. Damn the boundaries.

“And yours was a rather… _impotent_ attempt at requesting said dance,” Carmilla volleyed. “I’ve no time,” she spun away on her heel.

“Hey,” he said, reaching for Carmilla again, “why don’t you just—”

“Desist!”

Carmilla shirked his grip; even a thousand years later self-absorbed men _still_ believed they had the right to monopolize her time.

“He’s not letting up,” Danny said, “you can just poof out, no one will—”

“Hey!” blonde-slick-sick slurred, interrupting Danny’s soothing direction. And again there was a _hand_ on Carmilla’s body; but it wasn’t Danny’s wonderful hand, so worn and rugged with fingers that narrowed at the knuckles, the tender hand that touched Carmilla like she was _worth_ something, like she was _good_. No, this hand was worse. Pampered, smooth. Ornamented with a blood diamond and too orange to be a real tan. There was no callous on the third knuckle of either pointer finger, the places she and Danny both found tiny lumps emerging from their numerous reading sessions. He was probably of the generation that hadn’t ever touched a book.

“Do you know who I am?”

And apparently of the generation with their heads perpetually stuffed up their asses.

“I don’t care who you are,” Carmilla spat. “But you’ll be dead by night’s end if you don’t. Release. Me. Now.”

“Is there a problem here, sir?”

Figures moved over the carpet, soundless and urgent, bulky muscles closing in on a jeweled throat.

“Fuck! Security,” Danny swore. “Carm, just bolt, I don’t care! Come home, please, just come home—”

“If you call a death threat a problem, boys, then yeah, I’d say we’ve got a problem,” the blonde man snapped, holding Carmilla’s wrist skyward. She yanked it away with such force the blonde man’s arm careened into the wall, shattering the glass housing the painting.

“Motherfucker—”

“I said don’t—”

“What the—”

“Control,” the largest of the beefy dudes, all skull and no brain, pressed a finger to his ear and spoke gruffly: “We’ve had a threat confirmed against the prime minister’s son. Permission to commence extraction procedures?”

“A death threat?” Carmilla gaped. “You must be deranged—”

“Commence body search for concealed devices?” the senior security head spoke.

“Don’t touch me!” Carmilla insisted, displaying marvelous restraint. Even in her heels, she backpedaled with a predatory elegance.

“Boys, I’ll leave you to it,” blondie sneered, thumping the overlarge troglodytes atop the shoulders. He held his wrist close to his body and departed with a haughty look as one man moved in on Carmilla.

“They’re bystanders, Karnstein,” Danny spoke swiftly, faking a reassurance she didn’t necessarily feel. “Just leave, please, don’t cause a scene, just come home, please, just—”

“Miss, we’re going to need you to—”

“Is there a problem over here, gentlemen?”

There. Saving grace, in the form of a consumer economic specialist with a wrinkly face, lavender cardigan, and graying hair. EU economist Rosa Webb.

“Madame Secretary!” Security stood at attention and released Carmilla’s arm.

“Only a problem if you turn down a dance from some entitled prick,” Carmilla grumbled. “You’d think we’d be past that.”

“I should hope so,” the woman replied, kindly, but with a sharp set to her features that hinted at years of hard ball.

“You’re the Secretary of the EU, Madame—”

“Please, call me Rosa,” the woman said, extending her hand.

“Madame Secretary, this woman just assaulted Mitch Lieberman, so she needs to be removed—”

“Gentleman, need I remind you that women do, contrary to popular belief, possess eyes with which to observe and ears with which to hear. You need not tell me my toe is on my face and expect me to believe it just because you said so. Nor will I believe some crock about assault when the incident clearly occurred contrary to your telling. Let’s just leave this young woman to her night, shall we?” Rosa spoke with polite authority, direct and genteel and wholly irreproachable. “Mitchell, Jr. need not be in the papers again. We know how poorly the senator’s career has been doing.”

“Yes, Madame Secretary,” said the lead guard. A chorus of “Madame Secretaries” followed, and the guards dispersed like lycans confronted with silver.

“I suppose I should thank you for you interference,” Carmilla said. “Though I had it handled.”

“I would say you’re welcome, though the supposition was never followed by a statement of actual gratitude. Impertinence is not a flattering trait for a young lady.”

“Neither is submission.”

“I never said you should roll over and take it, but discourtesy merely for discourtesy’s sake suggests lapses of character.”

Carmilla suppressed an eye roll and soldiered on for Danny’s sake. “You revitalized the markets with historical stock analysis… that bit about the deviation from the NASDAQ?” Carmilla led.

“You’re interested in economic theory?” Rosa replied, apparently taken aback by Carmilla’s knowledge. Perhaps she’d not yet encountered discourtesy and economic interest in the same person.

“To be quiet honest, no. It doesn’t interest me in the least,” Carmilla replied bluntly. “But my girlfriend would kill me if I didn’t at least attempt cordial conversation with you. She’s a fan, I guess.”

“Well, we won’t let her down, will we?” Rosa inclined her head, and invited Carmilla to her table.

Carmilla had to sssshhh discreetly, because Danny wouldn’t stop squealing over the damned microphone.

 

* * *

 

 

“Holy crap!”

“Danny—”

“No, Carm, holy crap!”

“You’ve said that already.”

Carmilla darted out of the coat check at the EU event and groped at her pockets, searching for her cigarette. She stole away down a side hall, looking for an exit so she could smoke. Damn the current period and their incessant need for preserving health. They’d almost outlawed cigarettes in the 2300s.

“She looked like she was about to faint when you mentioned Nash’s Equilibrium,” Carmilla heard Danny titter on. “And then the segue into game theory and oligopoly analysis—fuck, sometimes I forget how smart you are.”

“Is intellect a turn on for you?” Carmilla mumbled, sidling out a door with her lighter in hand. The rain thumped against the covered walkway, hammering the awning with muted _thuds_. The night was dark and cloudy: no moon, no stars. She stuck the cigarette between her lips and cupped a flame in her hand. Her lip prints stained the end of the filter. She took a soothing drag, held it, and then breathed steam into the dark. “’Cause I can come home and talk common pool resources all night long, baby.”

“You’re so strange, Karnstein,” Danny teased, not unkindly.

“No, please—!”

Carmilla’s head swiveled sideways toward the cry. She saw a lone security officer blocking the entrance to the back alley. Behind him, the sounds of a scuffle echoed off the walls with an ominous, hollow foreboding. Had she been human, she’d never have heard it.

Vampiric constitution.

What a blessing… well, curse.

“Stop, please, I’ll give you anything—”

“Shut up—”

“Let go, oh my god, please no—”

“I said shut the fuck up, bitch—”

“Hey!”

Carmilla sighed unevenly and sauntered over toward the security guard, craning her neck around the massive form to get a better look at the altercation behind him. There was no reason… zero reason on the planet, hell, in the fucking _universe_ … for a slick blonde asshole in a tux to have a woman pressed up against the exposed brick of the embassy wall in the thick of the night, in the middle of the rain. There was no reason for him to have one hand around her throat and the other down his fly.

Lightening flashed and Carmilla’s fangs sharpened to lethal points.

“You gonna do something about that, you cretin?” Carmilla asked the security guard.

“Move along, miss,” the guard said.

Carmilla nearly vomited on the spot.

“Carm, what’s going on?” Carmilla heard Danny ask, but Gingersnap’s voice was garbled and distant. Carmilla’s singular brand of rage blinded her rationale.

Something tripped.

Vengeance, or bloodlust, she couldn't quite name it. It was like an emotional cocktail, hormonal imbalance, a definite _shift_ , between the part of her that snarked, that lazed, that occasionally reveled, the part of her that recalled the tiny joys, to the part of her that hungered, that hunted, that slaughtered and feasted. It happened very rarely now. Her hunts were frequently more controlled, could even be considered humane. But every once in a while, on a stormy night without barriers, Carmilla, _Carmilla_ , bad news in black leather with a millenium’s worth of wrath, would rail against the world that had killed her. The last time it had happened so violently, with the frenzy of a shark in a chum bath, had been about five years ago when Danny’d nearly burned to save her. The night she’d ripped the two men from the grounds crew apart limb by bleeding limb, lapping at the pool of blood on the hospital floor in her human form, crouched, manic, alert like a jungle cat.

Practically deranged.

Just as she felt right now. In the alley. Watching some fucker named Mitchell get away with rape because he was some important senator’s son.

Carmilla moved swiftly. A fist hit metal. She dodged something, felt wind near her ear, then the grit of something breaking in her hand. When she came to mere seconds later, the security guard was on the ground, immobile and bleeding.

Carmilla didn’t know how it happened.

Inky night turned red and thick, like bloodshot eyes after too much champagne. Rose-colored glasses on a mad, mad world. Beautiful blood, creamy and sweet as a root beer float, trickling onto the sidewalk and mixing in with the rainwater. She followed the viscous trail to the gutter near the edge of the alley entrance, could imagine a beautiful fall of blood and water, tumbling over the edge and into the sewer as it drained. She imagined showering in it, rinsing herself in blood. She was so thirsty. Incensed. Desiccated. She _needed_ to feed. She _needed_ to kill.

She didn’t need to torture. To extend the hurt as long as she could. Didn’t need to.

Just wanted to.

So… she did.

“Jackson, what’s—oh fuck, it’s you,” blondie snarled, releasing the girl’s throat.

The whimpering woman crouched low and scrambled for her heels. Her stockings were ripped and there was a curious fluid running along the interior of her legs. The blonde man (Mitch, Carmilla remembered [what a name for a fucker]) was zipping himself up, muttering all the while.

“I thought they booted you out of the—”

Famous last words.

She’d been under a sky of blue two and a half weeks ago, but now, in a back alley on the European mainland, everything rained red. Crimson and strawberry and gelatinous as cough syrup, her bloodlust seemed more potent because of her furious righteousness. In the back of her head she understood Danny—

“Carm, stop!”

—Danny Lawrence, fueled by ethics and virtue, protecting Silas from predators—

“C’mon Karnstein!”

—predators like this _thing_ before her, this unseemly excuse for life that stalked weaker beings because of some inherited ego trip—

“Carmilla! Carm, you have to stop, you’ve got to—”

And mother was right, right all along… they are so _weak,_ comparatively. Look, how easy it is to separate shoulder from socket, to rip and tear and listen as the muscle _ziiiiiips_ apart, as the bones _crackle_ under the strength of nimble fingers. Look, how the mucous gunk from the eyeballs trickles like rain water in a drain, brain matter dripping from an ear canal—

“Carmilla come home, don’t do this to yourself—”

And the blood: such wondrous, onerous, inundating blood.

It doesn’t even taste tainted. Just dense and heavy, tomato soup on an afternoon chilled by sleet. Blood wiggles down her throat and settles comfortably in her gut as she ravishes and destroys, pulls those idiotic blonde strands with brown roots ( _God, a fucking dye job?_ ) from the follicles and snaps the lower mandible from the skull with all the efficiency of a medical examiner opening a ribcage with a chest spreader.

And she feasts.

And she gulps.

And she feels so, so satisfied.

 

* * *

 

 

Carmilla stopped, her chest heaving. She’d always been a messy eater, but something about her hands… the fact that they were _slippery_.

She was so wet… why was she soaking wet?

“C—la?”

“Huh?” Carmilla asked.

“—stein—”

“What the—?”

“You… st—didn’t…—me.”

“What’s… what’s going on?” Carmilla asked, looking skyward, as if her stars could give her a little hope. She felt so… so anxious. Where were the stars? She couldn’t get home without them. She couldn’t _see_ them. She felt like she’d been drowning in blood and she couldn’t see the stars. The rain fell down and blinded her. Red pooled in her eyelashes, at her eye creases. It stung.

Carmilla jolted forward into the night. The wind whipped around the opening of the alley, blowing rain horizontally into her eyes, diluting the red. She stumbled over some bum’s shoe at the street entrance.

“Motherfucker,” she hissed, and kicked at the shoe.

Then stopped. Because that wasn’t a bum’s shoe. It was a loafer. Leather. Black. Recently shined. And it wasn’t just a shoe, but a sock as well. And an ankle, and part of a calf, and, from what she could recall of human anatomy, that was the white splintering of a tibia, snapped like a twig and torn from the body it once belonged to.

A chunk of body.

Carmilla was horrified.

But not of the body.

“D—D—Danny?” she called into the night.

No response.

“You didn’t… did you see all of that?” she whispered, though the rain might have made it hard for Danny to hear. Ambient noise over the supersensitive microphone had been such a bitch what with traveling over the past couple of weeks.

“Did you see all of that?” Carmilla spoke again, clearer, more accusatory than intended.

White noise on her end.

“Danny! Dammit, why won’t you _answer_ me?” she gasped, and pulled the circlet from her head.

Carmilla couldn’t get a grip on circle camera… her hands shook… she was so afraid… so afraid of what Danny would think of her, how Danny would hate her, how she’d basically fulfilled every vile musing Danny had ever entertained about her grisly nature. She’d let her down…

 

_Anything happens to her, I’m coming back here with that stake, got it?_

 

“Shit, shit, shit—motherfucker!”

 

_She just confessed to centuries of tricking girls into being her friend before she ate them!_

 

“Danny, fuck, this thing’s not… Danny, can—can you hear me?”

 

_Staking, immolation, you know, usually I'm not into this kind of stuff but in this case...  
_

 

A bit of static. Maybe she was still listening?

The door to the hotel swiveled open a block to her left. Someone in a fancy dress was being escorted out of the ballroom. The attendant offered his hand, and the umbrellas popped open. Lighting split the sky and Carmilla couldn’t tell the difference between the raindrops and her tears.

Danny wasn’t _answering_ her. Danny couldn’t… wouldn’t… Danny didn’t even want to _talk_ to her.

“Danny!” Carmilla called loudly.

She saw the doormen turn her direction, a choreographed tilt of the heads, the brows in sync as well, rising in questioned concern.

Carmilla slunk back into the shadows like the beast she was.

“Danny, can I still come home?” she asked quietly, fearing the answer.

Danny had seen her before, had seen her fangs, had seen her fight. But always against the supernatural. Carmilla had never (never, ever, ever in her centuries of existence) fed on a human in front of anyone she’d been so close to. She couldn’t bear to see her friends ( _I don't have any friends_ )... her lovers watch her, eyes glazed over and foggy, high on hemoglobin. Couldn’t bear to know they’d witnessed her go ballistic, _animalistic_ , because that’s what she was.

Not human.

Never ever human.

Just… living. But not quite alive.

“Please, Danny… let me… will you let me come home?” Her voice hitched, and she hated herself for it. "Tell me you want me home..."

Radio silence on the other end.

“If you… can you just say something, Gingersnap? I’m… I’m not… no, I just want to come home. Just say something so I know I can come home. Say… Danny, I’m sorry. I love you." 

The tone from the speaker shifted from silence to white noise, meaning Danny had deactivated the communication setting.

"Please."

Carmilla hurled the device against the exterior wall and it shattered, crunching the brick and fissuring the cement. Like shifting tectonics, or a lighting bolt from the ground gone up, the wall cracked along with what was left of Carmilla’s heart.

She yielded to the weight of the rain and sank into the bloody gutter.

Carmilla cried, and tried to sleep forever.

 

* * *

 

 

“Carmilla!!! C’mon, Karnstein, don’t do this to me!” Danny yelled at the hologram as Carmilla spoke, face bereft, helpless in the rain. Carmilla had gone to town on that guy, breaking and ravaging and slinging him about so hard she’d lost control of her own body a couple of times. Danny could relate. In the heat of battle, when the adrenaline’s pumping… she’d nearly knocked her own self out a few times. No wonder Carm had nearly smashed her head open against the dumpster.

“You can stop now, c’mon. I know you didn’t have anyone before, but now you have me. Get your ass back here right now, Carmilla!”

Danny watched Carmilla grope about at her forehead. She was all red and black, a hellish circus freak. Audrey Hepburn turned ghoulish in the gutter, and Danny just _knew_ that idiot was blaming herself for some manufactured wrong, or an actual past wrong, or some senseless fear weighted down from previous grievances that Danny gave zero shits about.

“Carm, can you hear me?”

No noise over the hologram, none from the speaker. Broken microphone or speaker on Carm’s end, cause she’d knocked her skull against that guy’s teeth…

“Carm, can you hear—”

_Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepppp!_

“Motherfucker!” Danny yelled, then bolted out of the cabin. She returned seconds later, scrabbling around the kitchen, looking for the thing, the _thing_ that might get that damn vampire back to her. She found the sheet, pocketed it, and knocked the coffee table over in her haste.

She didn’t see the hologram disconnect.

Danny sprinted off into the wooded night, completely safe now that Silas had no more supernatural threats to accost her. She made it to campus in record time, darting around moonlit corners until she arrived at the bookstore. She hammered on the front door, to no avail. It was only once she contemplated scaling the wall that she realized her feet were bleeding, having run the mile shoeless.

“Screw it,” she said, and did a fair job of alternating between windowsill and gutter, shimmying up the side of the building with surprising agility for one with such long limbs. Orange hair and swinging abilities? Maybe she was part orangutan instead of mongoose. She rapped at a second floor window until it opened.

“Chuck?”

“Daniele?”

Crawling in through the window was trickier, since it was such a small frame. Explaining was even more difficult, because she just _knew_ Karnstein would get that fucking chip on her shoulder, that heavy block, and at the same time she couldn’t actually begrudge Carmilla the chip because it was shitty and traumatic… Danny did begrudge her the fact that Carm didn’t come back to her, didn’t let her help, because, dammit, that’s what Danny _does._

She helps people when they can’t help themselves.

And Carmilla is damn capable. And damn smart. But right now, she needs help. And Danny just wants to pick her up and hold her close and tell her it’s okay. But she can’t _do that_ , not when her girlfriend—vampire—soulmate has decided to lie down in the gutter a thousand miles away.

“When you find her, give her these,” Danny said, and shoved the sheet over to Chuck. “Tell her she deserves them. Every single one, and more. For helping me all the times she did. She’d never have been able to help me if she wasn’t the way she is. I don’t care if she was your overlord or whatever back in the day, you drag her back here kicking and snarking if you have to. Tell her I want her here. She needs to hear that.”

“She’s in Belgium?” the old man asked.

“Brussels, right. Metropole Hotel. At least, that’s where she was last. Don’t come home without her.”

“How do you know she won’t be home shortly?”

“I just do. Can’t believe I do, but I just know. I can’t really explain it either, but she doesn’t think she can come back. Please, Chuck. Do this for me.”

“Of course, Daniele. I’ll retrieve her as quickly as I can.”

 

* * *

 

 

It took Chuck six days to locate Carmilla and bring her back to Silas. They pulled up in a taxi on the western edge of campus, Chuck having taken his bird form to make the flight quicker. Chuck lifted Carmilla out of the back and she stumbled, drunkenly, head downturned, skin paler than ice.

But her face…

Her hands…

They were covered in little golden star stickers.

Danny smiled, happy to finally make good on a promise from five years ago, inconsequential as it may have seemed. She wanted to give Carmilla the stars, little medallions of achievement that she could collect and admire and be _proud_ of. Because yeah, Carmilla did shitty things. She also did astounding things, just like Danny. They were neither wholly good nor bad… and, well, Danny just wanted to help.

And Carmilla? Carm just wanted Danny.

Danny and the stars.

After everything she’d been through, Danny believed the Nightwalker deserved every one.

"You got my message?" Danny asked, reaching out to touch her face.

Carmilla staggered into Danny’s arms and clutched her shoulder. She was drunk, half-starved if her cheeks were any indicator, and depressed out of her mind.

“Thanks, Chuck, I’ll take it from here,” Danny said, scooping Carmilla up like a child. She was so skinny, so knobby, her dress shredded and her hair matted. The palm of one of her fancy gloves was missing. She reeked of booze and blood and street. And to top it all off, she hadn’t been able to make eye contact with Danny since arriving.

They walked for several silent moments and turned the path into the Silas trees. It was a nice day in May, pleasant, springy and verdant. The kind of day that held a number of possibilities, if only she could capitalize on them.

“Gingersnap?” Carmilla mumbled into Danny’s throat.

“Yeah?” Danny slowed, readjusting her hold on Carmilla's body.

“I’m sorry,” she ground out, and Danny felt hot moisture against her neck.

“I know.”

“No, y-y-you don’t,” Carmilla slurred. “I’m not sorry I did it. I’m sorry you saw it.”

Danny walked a little farther, grunting under the effort of carrying Carmilla all the way back to their cabin. Her vampire was getting a bath, hot tea, and probably a lecture.

Not necessarily in that order.

“There’s only one thing you should be sorry about, and that’s not it,” Danny grumbled, turning west towards the thicket that hid their glimmered cabin.

“Hmmm?”

“You should be sorry for thinking you couldn’t come home. Don’t you ever feel afraid to come home,” Danny charged her, and ducked her face down to meet Carmilla’s. “Fuck that list… you wanna know the only thing you have to do, Karnstein? The one thing?”

Carmilla still wouldn’t open her eyes, even though they were surely burning from the tears. She even _cried_ stubbornly, the undead asshole.

“Wha-what’s that, Red Vine?”

“You come home to me. You never feel like you can’t come home, no matter what you do. Promise me.”

“Danny—”

“Promise me you’ll always come home. We leave together or we don’t leave at all, okay? We’re stuck with each other so we make the best of it. Promise me.”

“I… Danny, didn’t you see what I—”

“I saw. And I don’t care. I mean, I do care but… that's you. That's a part of you. I love you, and I've lived long enough to understand that the grey areas are the most prominent. We navigate them with our natures as best we can. God, Carm, I don’t know how to make it any clearer!” Danny said, leaning back against a tree to rest. “Why won’t you believe me?”

Carmilla mumbled something into her shoulder.

“What?”

“I haven’t had the greatest track record with women who return my affections.”

“Well good, ‘cause this isn’t affection,” Danny said, placing Carmilla on her feet. The forest welcomed them home, gave them their space, quieted the winds for Danny’s explanation:

“It’s there, affection, yeah, but this… you’re… you’re the closest to forever that I’ll ever get. You’re affection and you’re pain and you’re frustration and you’re passion and you’re the stars… God, Carm. You’re everything! Can’t you see how good you are, how… much you mean to me? You’re worth too much for me to let you walk away like that. You’re worth it, Carm, Mircalla, love. You. Are. Worth. It.”

Danny watched Carmilla fidget. Watched her cry soundlessly. Felt her link trembling fingers around the back of her neck and strain to stand. Carmilla leaned against her, loved her, and… maybe there was something that did shift… something that signified the capitulation in her dark, broken eyes… Carmilla let Danny love her back.

Danny wrapped a hand about her waist and held her close, tapped at every tiny star sticker Carmilla had plastered to her face in a doubtlessly drunken stupor. She kissed Carmilla’s forehead, relishing the contact after several absent months.

“Will you let me take care of you? And can you... can you take care of me? For as long as our forever lasts?” Danny asked.

Carmilla nodded, and collapsed against her.

Danny supported her the rest of the way back to the cabin, loving her all the while.

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do gruesome chapters turn out so fluffy? I hate it. Also, who knows things about economic theory and policy? *crickets* okay, good, me neither, cause most of that was total nonsense. Don't fault me for trying to sound more intelligent than I am, these two have twenty-five hundred years and a whole lot of Jeopardy episodes between them.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was gonna end this series with Push, and then the bucket list idea popped up and that's too fun a trope not to play with. I might go back and rearrange the series since everything is so chronologically wacked up right now. Thanks so much for sticking with this crazy series as long as you have, guys! As always, feedback is wholeheartedly appreciated, especially constructive criticism.


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